While I thought that tags where self-explanatory I have gotten questions asking me to explain them and tag related phenomenon so I thought that a post describing them would be beneficial.

Essentially, tags are a form of metadata which is data about data. The internet is just one mass of unorganized information and the challenge that many social media web services are tackling is how to organize that data and make it easily accessible.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live were at the front lines for helping people find what they were looking for on the internet. But now with Web 2.0 and the rise of social media web sites like Islamify, Digg and Del.icio.us, the use of tags has become an important and more efficient means to organize user submitted data.

To take Islamify as an example, whenever someone submits an article they must also submit tags, which are basically words that describe the article in a relevant way. For example, this is an article which was submitted to Islamify.com: “Morocco trains female imams to spread moderate Islam.” The tags in this case could be “morocco, imams, women, moderate islam.” This allows searchers to easily find articles that they are looking for or topics they are interested in.

Tags are also increasingly used to organize data in ways that are more in tune with the way people think. For example, the email organizing system that Gmail uses is essentially based on tagging except that tags are called labels. When filing away your email you can put several labels on one message. This allows you to place one email in several different categories making it superior to a filing system that forces you to decide on only one place to file information that might be relevant across many different topics.

Another popular use of tags is to create a tag cloud which organizes tags on the basis of popularity. A tag is represented with larger type and bolder font the more often it is used. This gives you a visual representation of the hottest topics on a blog or social media site.

Check out the tag cloud on Islamify.com and find articles that interest you.

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